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I took away several questions from this discussion that I did not come in with. One question regards the role of culture in love. Several of the Time articles discussed how people detect MHC in potential partners and unconsciously use this as a measure of how compatible they are with that person. Thus, researchers urge women to get off of the pill and people to stay away from meds that can mask their ability to detect the compatibility of their partner’s MHC. Similar to effect drugs can have on our ability to detect MHC, I wonder if the images and expectations of love that culture engrains in our minds throws off our ability to find the partner we are most compatible with. Media and social norms push us to pursue a certain kind of mate by defining what is attractive and what is appropriate dating behavior. Maybe all these expectations and pre-defined images of who we should pursue throws off our ability to find our real match that we would be most compatible with.

Also, I think culture plays a huge role in blowing love out of proportion. All the songs, movies, shows, books and general talk about love increases the desire to be in love and such strong desire can bring about the intense emotions associated with love. There are other emotional/mental states that stimulate the reward system and bring about a state of euphoria (such as being successful in something or even something simple as being full). However, as mentioned in class, society places a much larger emphasis on love. So it do our brains really have a special love circuit or is our obsession with love a product of culture?

Moreover, maybe it is this over-emphasis on love that pushes scientists to explain this phenomenon that drives so many to do crazy, unexplainable things in its name. Perhaps there is this pressure for researchers to break down love into smaller, biological components to prove that love is something that is really powerful and can drive you over the edge—to support the image of love that society has developed. However, as we discovered in our class survey, these scientific papers may not necessarily be very useful or educational. Research may just be done to provide some “hard science” evidence behind love while not providing anything substantial to be learned. I think this is particularly true when science tries to localize everything to certain brain regions (as mentioned by Paul).

I like the idea that our brain has the power to create something that we cannot fully explain. Similar to how a series of simple numbers can give rise to many complex combinations that cannot be attributed to one number, different brain regions/processes can give rise to mental/behavioral phenomena that cannot be tied to specific brain regions. This is why I like Vidya’s idea of thinking of love as a pattern. Not necessarily a pattern in that there is a shared similarity among all people, but that there is a collection of neural events that gives rise to and uniquely defines love for a particular person. Much like how we discussed how every person may have a unique manifestation of a mental illness, maybe love is unique to the individual.